Mary Faulkner has attempted to make a sweeping journey through Women's Spirituality, unfortunately, the endeavor was way too ambitious and thus severely lacking.
Dislikes -
many of her generalities contrasting male/female spirituality are poorly researched and what little notes she has come across as - man bad / woman good - which isn't so bad in itself yet she doesn't concede any balance or appreciation and thus comes across as a hater

the history of female spirituality is lacking in good research and the academic rigor that should go along with it i.e. some of the leaders in female spirituality she describes contain erroneous information - like cut and paste wikipedia before the editing
she attempts to cover too much with too little information
she gives an overabundance of attention to nonChristian leaders and seems to be in the dark with any of those, which I could name at least 15 that should have been mentioned.

Likes
for somebody that has never been exposed to any overview of women's spirituality it is a beginning
It is riddled with some great one-liners
where her writing shines is when she gives quick bios of current and past leaders in the field, but realize that's writing not research ( )

I picked up this book to see how the field of "Women & Spirituality" has changed since I first encountered it 30 years ago. The book relates some exciting developments, but unfortunately the writing is rather boring. I had to force myself to finish reading and couldn't stomach more than a few pages at a time. Luckily, each chapter was only about 10 pages long. Apparently this author has also written "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Women's Spirituality" (which I have not read); this book does not seem to go much beyond that type of book in either content or presentation. The book also could have used a good editor and proofreader as there were numerous minor errors and several structural strangenesses that editing could/should have improved.

In terms of an overview, the book tries to cover everything from ancient goddess archetypes through Jewish and Christian tradition, Native Spirituality, New Age practices, and Spiritual projects in communities. Although the back cover lists many spiritual practices supposedly covered in the book "Buddhism, Hinduism, Wicca, Neo-paganism, Christianity, Judaism, Jungian psychology, and Native American, as well as Celtic and African/Caribbean beliefs," many are only represented by a single practitioner and most are not presented in enough detail. The absence of any mention of women in Islamic traditions is rather glaring to anyone conscious of current world and cultural events.

In the end, I might recommend this book to someone who knows absolutely nothing about Women & Spirituality and wants a simple overview . . . but then it would probably be better to assess which of the many forms of Women's Spirituality most closely matches this hypothetical person and send them towards more specific, better written, resources. ( )